In theory, that's all nice and dandy. The problem in the real world, however, is that today's DSLRs produce RAW images that have 50MB+ in size per photo, that movies in 1080p are easily 4 to 8 GBs big and that an average high quality mp3 also easily has more than 10 MB.
Now you want to actually edit and manipulate one or two or three of those files. Let's say you want to create a collage from six of those high resolution RAW images. Or you want to create an audio file with eight tracks.
And you want to do that on your fancy iPad, which is ah-so capable.
You will quicker run out of those 256MB memory than you can imagine, and the thing will start swapping like crazy. If it even -can- swap memory.
And memory costs nothing these days. The only reason why Apple has not put more memory into that device is that they wanted to squeeze as much profit in those USD 499 as possible. End of discussion.
What really annoys me is this endless circle that somebody compare to the Stockholm syndrom:
Apple releases a product WITHOUT dozens of features that people actually wanted. But you will always have an army of self proclaimed Apple defenders and fanboys who will find millions of excuses why you don't need any of those features. Or why Apple's much weaker features are still okay compared to the competition that's technologically years ahead. For example, a 1 Megapixel camera in a mobile device compared to 5 Megapixel cameras (with Zeiss lenses) that are in competing products - and still everybody will say that Apple's outdated and inferior technology is "just fine".
If Apple was going to release a computer without a CPU, you'd probably still find Apple fanboys who'd defend that.
Apple has products that are worth their price. I just don't think that the iPhone, iPod and iPad are among them - especially not with all the artificial restrictions in those devices that are only there to make the customer a slave to iTunes and the AppStore.
